


Cub in the Yard

by audreycritter



Series: Hug Prompts [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Bruce Wayne is a Good Dad fight me, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, TW: Nightmares, and some comfort, beware here be angst, cassandra cain deserves all the good things, except that cass is sick, hug prompts, it was the best of PN52 it was the best of rebirth, no worst of times, platonic cuddling for comfort, strep throat, the Holy Grail: a forehead kiss, wayne manor is huge, wibbly-wobbly canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 12:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14832446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: “Cassandra,” he said gently, and it was a gift how he said her name, so unlike the way He had always said her name. One was like a blanket, the other like broken bones.“Sick,” she croaked, leaning against the dryer.“Strep,” he agreed, that word that she had just yesterday learned meant agony in her throat and hatred in the rest of her— body hating itself. “Wait here.”hug prompt 4: sick!fic





	Cub in the Yard

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, line 13.

A wolf was stealing her French fries. She sat motionless, watching gleaming white fangs delicately pinch fries off her pale blue plate. The gentle movement ended in a gulping snarl, when the wolf’s head— craggy with tufts of fur— shook the fries like a small and broken animal.

Cassandra stared at it and didn’t breathe. She could fight a wolf, but she was small and it would hurt. Maybe for a long time. But that was her  _food_  disappearing down the wolf’s greedy throat, while it huffed stinking hot breath on her ear. She glanced desperately at Bruce, to see if he would move to help. It wouldn’t hurt so much if she wasn’t alone; there would be less time, less opportunity, for those teeth and claws to tear.

He was reading the paper, his own plate empty. Wind whistled through the room and the newspaper pages fluttered. Cassandra swallowed, and jolted slightly, when the wolf licked her fingers lying flat on the table. The fries were gone.

She opened her mouth but there was no voice there. It was missing. The wolf was sniffing now, along her wrist, her arm. Her belly was burning and empty, her muscles taut.

“That is all that will be served for this meal,” Alfred said, sweeping the plate away.

She couldn’t speak. The wolf growled, hackles rising, at the smell of her neck. From the halls, the wind turned icy. She gasped at the cold and that was the mistake. The wolf snapped like lightning, razors sinking into the flesh under her chin. It drowned her scream in choking blood and she thrashed, throwing an arm around the wolf’s head. If she flipped, if she kicked off the chair, if she moved maybe she could…she could…

“Get yourself out,” Bruce snapped, throwing the paper down on the table. It was Bruce’s body, his lips, his hands. David’s voice.  _His_  voice.

The jaws clamped with feral strength, wrenching sideways. She could smell and see nothing but gray fur, red blood, white snow, black cave, brown tree, pale moon, and hungry, hungry, hungry and smoking oil in her throat.

“Cassandra,” the wolf said, urgently, and her body stopped being a stupid, wooden thing and  _moved_. She struck the wolf’s ear and it hissed. “Cassandra,” it said again, somehow still calm. It was a voice for giving orders. “Open your eyes.”

Cassandra opened her eyes.

It was not the forest or the dining room at midday. It was the laundry room in the manor, a single warm night light on near the overhead switch. She was tucked against the warm dryer, the drum still humming as it spun.

Bruce was crouched in front of her, one hand over his ear. Blood seeped through his fingers. His face was that careful, undistracting blank— she barely glanced at it. The curves and angles and tension of him said he was worried— about his ear? No.

About her.

“Cassandra,” he said gently, and it was a gift how he said her name, so unlike the way  _He_  had always said her name. One was like a blanket, the other like broken bones.

“Sick,” she croaked, leaning against the dryer.

“Strep,” he agreed, that word that she had just yesterday learned meant agony in her throat and hatred in the rest of her— body hating itself. “Wait here.”

He stood and walked away, calling for Alfred. She closed her eyes and listened to his receding footsteps.

When a hand touched her shoulder, she opened her eyes again and he was there with a bandage on his ear. “Up,” he said. “With me.”

Cassandra bunched her face into a scowl and Bruce made a noise that might have been laughter, a twist to his mouth.

“Up,” he said, holding a hand out. “Come on, Gremlin.”

She let him pull her to her feet, out of the warm tucked-away corner. She shivered and Bruce pulled her beneath his arm, hugging her to his side.

“A bad dream,” she said, as he guided her away from the laundry room. Her eyes flicked up to his ear. “Sorry.”

“It’s nothing,” he said, and this might have been a lie from almost anyone else. People, she knew, didn’t like being hurt. Some would be angry for hours about things like a papercut. Bruce wasn’t lying though, and she inched closer to him while they walked.

The room where they ended up was not the den or bedroom she expected. It was a room with pastel paper, a new fire in the fireplace, a thick rug. There was a couch, low shelves full of wooden toys, and books.

“Where?” Cassandra asked, frowning.

“The nursery,” Bruce said, tucking blankets around her on the couch. He sat down next to her and she undid all the work with the blankets to scoot over and press herself against his side. The blankets were resettled without comment. “My father slept in this room when he was a child. I didn’t. My mother didn’t like to think of me here by myself. It’s far from the other bedrooms. They didn’t hire a nursemaid to stay with me, like my father had.”

Cassandra’s focus flitted about the room. The crib, the slightly larger bed with narrow wooden rails. The longer bed, still thin.

“They left it. It upset my grandmother to think of it not being used, I was told later. I played here. Sometimes, when we had guests, Alfred would sit with me and I’d nap on the child’s bed. It was quiet.”

In the low light, she noticed other things. A box of blocks, a floppy stuffed alligator, metal racecars in a neat line.

“Why?” Cassandra asked, her throat stinging with the use. Bruce pressed a mug into her hands and she inhaled the steam, briefly looking at Alfred when he gave her a nod while leaving the room. She liked that he understood how she meant thank you, without saying it. It made her want to try to say it more often.

“Hm?” Bruce replied. “Oh. The room.”

She nodded.

“Mother also put me in here when I was ill. She joked it was to keep the germs away from the others— I don’t think I liked that joke. I remember feeling very angry until she explained that she wasn’t serious, and that ruined it a bit. It was really so she could keep a close eye on me. She was…an unusual mother, I think. She never hired a nanny, but she went back to work when she could. I went with her, or stayed with Alfred. I didn’t know at the time it wasn’t how their friends handled children. But she couldn’t afford the lost sleep from spending the night in a chair. Father couldn’t have me kicking his back because of his work at the hospital.”

Cassandra finished the tea and held the empty cup, watching him with unbroken and unashamed attention. He was looking at the fire, the shadows on his face obscuring the scars across his cheek.

Bruce’s arm was still around her shoulder, so she knew he was relaxed, but the way he moved his other hand, his thumb brushing the couch arm, was…nervous? No. A missing. A wanting.

It was a thing to calm himself, like a whisper to a victim in a Gotham crime scene, one of the first things she learned in training:  _Shh. Shh._

He knew when to be silent with her, and she liked that. She liked that they could spend an entire night saying nothing with their mouths and everything with their motions. It was safe.

But sometimes, she thought he talked more to her than he did to the others. Maybe it was that nobody would fill that silence for them, the way she knew Dick and Clark and Tim and Babs and Steph would. Cassandra still didn’t know how. It didn’t mean she always liked the silence, just that the silence  _was_ — a fact like her limbs, a thing that existed.

Sometimes, her limbs hurt.

Since she’d arrived in Gotham and found them, found him, Bruce had gotten better and better at knowing those times and filling the hurting silence with words, with stories. She could track the way it had gotten easier for him, from the first times it had hurt to watch him almost as much as it hurt to hold the silence. It wasn’t like that now, like muscles grown steady with practice.

She didn’t think Tim believed her, how much she knew about the Waynes. “I know,” she’d said once, licking a hazelnut chocolate ice cream cone. “Grandmother’s favorite. Like mine.”

“Martha’s?” he had asked, to clarify. “Mm. I dunno.”

“I know,” she’d insisted. His shoulders moved like disbelief— he thought she was confused, or making things up, and that in turn confused him. It put him on edge. She dropped it.

But she did know, because Bruce had told her. The Waynes were frequent topics, as if they filled his head and his memories more than other things. Cassandra thought of David, the way he still haunted corners and loud voices in crowds and stained everywhere she went, always.

She wondered what it would be like to have that the other way— for all the phantoms to be reminders of a precious, lost thing, instead of the venom that bit into precious freedom. She didn’t know if she was jealous or not, because both left ugly wounds through the both of them.

Both left them staggering from the pain of it.

“Cassandra?”

Her face was wet. His thumb stopped brushing the couch back and forth, and instead brushed her cheek. There was alarm in him. He took the empty mug and set it aside.

“Okay,” she said softly. She ducked her head against his shoulder, pinning him down and interrupting his attempt to get up. “Okay.”

“Alright,” he said, and he began stroking her hair. He stopped. “After…after they…”

“I know,” she said. He started stroking her straight black locks again. They felt gross with sweat and fever. She felt gross with sweat and fever, all over.

“I didn’t come in here again for a long time. Not until Dick came to live here, when we were looking for toys.”

“Hard?” Cassandra asked.

Bruce considered this, while the logs crackled and shifted in front of them. He made a small scoffing noise, something like mild surprise.

“No,” he said. “This room had always been safe. When they were gone, I think that I didn’t want to ruin that. I thought I could preserve it somehow. I wouldn’t even let Alfred get any of the toys or books out. But when Dick came, I told myself it was about time. I’d faced a lot of other things by then. Would you believe it made me nervous?”

“Yes,” Cassandra said, immediately. He looked down at her and studied her with a serious crease in the corners of his eyes.

“It doesn’t surprise me that you would,” he decided. “Well. It did. And it was for nothing. It felt just like the rest of the house. I hadn’t saved or ruined anything by waiting so long. Dick was too old for most of it, anyway, and so we just never really needed it again. Alfred must have kept it in order for some reason. Hope, I guess. He always wanted me to settle down.”

“Not settling kind,” Cassandra parroted at him, from a gala she’d gone to last month, where she’d followed him at a far distance while he worked the crowd. She’d hated it. Hated how wrong he looked. Fake happy was such an  _ugly_ happy. But she grinned now, looking up at him. It made the ache in her throat a little easier to bear. The grin turned impish. “Cats don’t settle, either. Move a lot. Scratch your hand.”

He squeezed her shoulders and his chest rumbled with a noiseless laugh. “No, it’s not quite what Alfred meant. He’s adjusted. I think this is better anyway, don’t you?”

Cassandra thought about wolves dragging away the rabbit she’d managed to catch, about David’s shouts chasing her until Bruce overshadowed them with his steady orders, about Alfred serving breakfast with more than she could eat while she watched the little, secret smiles go from Bruce to Selina, ducking her head to see their hands clasped beneath the table, the bitter help of real medicine, the soft warmth of a bed under a solid roof, wind that beat and howled against walls that would not let it in.

She looked at the line of red and green and blue and yellow racecars and tried to imagine Bruce, smaller than Damian, pushing them across the rug. She imagined a woman in the corner whose face floated like the portrait down the hall, always with an unchanging expression in Cassandra’s mind. Kind, but silent, mere brushstrokes instead of a beating heart.

Martha still watched over Bruce like that in the study where he worked, like years had gone by and she’d refused to stop watching. That meant, Cassandra supposed, that she saw them all now.

She saw the way Bruce was  _real_  happy and not fake ugly happy whenever Cassandra or her brothers were nearby. The way he was this contradiction— shy and confident— whenever Selina was with him.

It meant Martha saw her when she hid in the study, Cassandra retreating from the noise of the world, to curl in an armchair and eat Alfred’s brownies and just  _feel_  without an audience or a mission. Sad and angry and wounded and joyful and excited and all the things that were just her, just Cassandra.

Thinking about life without  _that_  almost took her breath away, raised a different ache in her hurting throat.

“Better,” she croaked. “Yes.”

Bruce pulled her closed, a hug with two arms, and kissed the top of her head.

“Sleep,” he ordered.

“Story,” she demanded in return. “Not Cinderella. You mess it up.”

“Thank you,” he said dryly. “Always good to know I don’t live up to Dick’s standard. Hm.”

“Case story,” she said. “Early one.”

“Don’t tell the others, but you’re my favorite,” Bruce said and she smiled even though he wasn’t looking at her face. “Okay. It was July. There was an awful heat wave. I came home with heat exhaustion from the suit more than once, this was before I figured out the coolant panels…”

Cassandra burrowed down into the circle of his arms and made a pillow of his chest. He needed sleep too, if she could keep him stuck there long enough to feel it. His voice was low and quiet in the room, and she stared for a long time at the plush alligator with its button eyes.

It wasn’t a room he had ruined by leaving it for so long.

It felt just like the rest of the house.

Safe.


End file.
